thinking about starting a ranger on phinny for the versatility of being able to bow or melee. heard rangers bow dps goes down or rather that their melee gets better. dunno.
happen to know how frequently that AA is available? thinking about maining a ranger on phinny with an sk and a sham on 2 other boxes for support. i want to main the ranger for his options in play style i.e. being able to do most the pulling (can use sk for more difficult pulls) park mobs with root. small heals on sham to support canni. offtank when i feel like. bow down stuff. dunno. when i was doing just sk/sham i got really sick of just watching the SK swing away so whatever i add to my sk/sham team will be the main focus toon and i would like to have some diversity in play style. some that come to mind: chanter, ranger. druid. necro
Luclin with the release of Endless quiver and Archery Mastery 1/2/3 makes archery best source of dps with or without trueshot. Planes of Power keeps that trend with tradeable elemental bows. Gates will make the shift to melee in group situations and archery on burns due to the huge increase in melee weapon ratios (elf shoe for example). It pretty much stays that way for several expansions.
That combined with the lack of AA DPS support for the archer and the increase in melee dps AA support along with the communities' whines and arguments of melee vrs archery. The ranger community was divided on DPS so the devs where divided on how to proceed with design. Gates made the jump in ratios. Timespinner from Plane of Time Phase 5, was 23/22. Ikkiniz, a relatively easy raid with easy early access made the Darkglint Blade 29/23 available to the ranger masses. That was a huge jump that until that time was unseen in Eq's young history. At the time, there was no autofire in game. Some rangers preferred melee due to the fact that in-order to dps effiiciently you needed a 3rd party program to press the ranged attack key. This combined with the people crying that to melee required 'more skill' divided the players and set the tone for the next several expansions, further dividing the community. In addition we had no idea how much damage we were doing. Parsing was relatively new concept that wasn't fully embraced til after the release of WoW and didn't migrate to EQ right off. It was all done by 'feel'. You felt like you did more damage watching big crits scroll by (big at the time). To get a truly accurate idea you could parse it out now, with the tools available it would be easy on a test server dummy.
Thanks for the informative response. If I make a sham/ranger/sk box team for OoW on phinny will my ranger be bow or melee? I was going to mainbox the ranger and run agro macro scripts on the sk on side box. The allure to the ranger is the diversity in play style. I don't like being forced to just watch my character auto attack. Hence not mainboxing the sk
OoW would be melee, thats the 2.0 epic expansion (which was a bow til it was changed last minute to a sword). I recently played a rogue during the OoW specialty server and had a blast. Most melee in early eq is just auto attack with the hitting of kick/backstab/frenzy/flying kick the only 'player action' required.
Unless you're describing some change since the content was current? melee weapons beat bows of the same tier all along. That elemental bows could be sold in bazaar to those that couldn't get equivalent 1h at the time was a bit of an anomaly. I guess it would depend on whether your play is /bazaar level or actually get out & get things level
